I ought to be feeling a little schadenfreude at the struggles of Sony, the legendary electronics firm that just projected its biggest ever loss of more than $6 billion.
My first job out of college was at Panasonic (formally called Matsushita Electric) which is a bigger, older company that always had arguably better technology but lacked the marketing pizzaz of the upstart. I was taught that Sony wasn't much more than a few trendy products.
But over the years I've been secretly hoping that Sony management would somehow find a way to integrate hardware, software and content to create a serious competitor to Apple, Microsoft and the others. That sure didn't happen. After years of drift, Sony just named a new CEO, who announced some restructuring and recalibrated direction.
Unfortunately, as I learned as a reporter in Tokyo, Sony remains firmly part of Japan Inc. There's a serious lack of focus: It just announced plans to spinoff a chemicals business but still has life insurance, bank and securities subsidiaries. Its website is a mess, with separate sites and identities all around the world.
Still I'd like it to succeed partly to show up The New York Times and its typically trite coverage of Japan. In their story about Sony on Sunday I counted at least a half-dozen cultural cliches. A gong must sound anytime copy from the Tokyo bureau lands in Manhattan.
The idea of hanging a story on the change of a CEO is silly, though it's a standard type of business angle. Even a superstar CEO can't change a massive company overnight, especially in Japan. You would have to talk to lots of rank-and-file employees to get a sense of whether change is afoot — a lot more work than calling up analysts for quotes.
I'm rooting for Sony. I hope the top leadership makes some bold moves and then communicates the changes to the rest of the world. And when they need help getting their message out, I hope they call.